Bad Boys and Breasts

If my excitement level is detectable it’s because we’re under a winter weather “advisory” right now, and the thermometer might dip just low enough to make a little freezing rain happen. As my principal said today, however, “We haven’t had winter weather for two years.” So we’ll see.

Regardless of tomorrow’s happenings, today was a rather straight forward recovery from the end of the world, which was my two weeks of vacation coming to a close. No matter that I’d had a more-than-adequate “re-entry zone” as recommended by KTdid, which unfortunately devolved into nothing but yesterday’s recovery zone for my ailing belly. Today was a full day of school and my belly rose to the occasion even as it sank in misery that the holiday festivities were over.

As mundane as “getting back to work” may sound, however, it was actually a pretty fun day, partly due to my off-the-cuff operation of instruction.

Today was my day to meet with a group of seven boys who receive remedial attention from their teachers. As is frequently the case when this group traipses in, I pulled a stack of trusty workbooks off the shelf, passed them out, and flipped to the next section, about an inventor. “Perfect,” I thought. “We’ll learn about biography.”

And learn we did.

Now, let me just say that these boys suffer from a variety of maladies, mostly that they would rather not read and rather not be in school. Their interjections of “I went bear huntin’ on Saturday” into our pre-reading discussion of important inventions in their bedrooms (“I have a John Deere,” one drawled. “I have lots of them posters in my room.” Another said, “I have a blow torch.” Another said, “I can make a blow torch. If you take a lighter and hold up a bottle of cologne…” but I didn’t let him finish) and new vocabulary (“‘Artificial’ is like getting a cow pregnant, right?” said John Deere boy) created a general semblance of chaos that I barely rescued by diving wholeheartedly into the passage I had blindly selected for us to read.

I did not remain blind for long. It turned out, the inventor of note was in fact a certain Ruth Handler, whose daughter Barbie loved to play with paper dolls, which gave Ruth the idea to create a doll with more adult-like proportions and with body parts that moved–named Barbie, of course–whose boyfriend Ken was named after the real Barbie’s brother. Ruth and her husband went on to form the Mattel toy company.

Now, if boys in general don’t necessarily like reading about Barbie dolls, and the “adult-like proportions” hadn’t yet caught their imaginations, this group of prepubescent youngsters would soon be fully engrossed in the text. The next paragraphs did away with any need for internal conjuring. Indeed, I had to pause the reading occasionally for some “giggle time,” to let the boys just let it all out. (I was about to burst myself.)

It seems that later Ruth came down with breast cancer and lost one of her breasts–and none of the various sizes and shapes of replacements seemed right to her. (The seriousness of this was not lost on this group of boys, mind you. One said, “We thought my mother might have breast cancer, but on Christmas Eve we found out she doesn’t.”) Ruth went on to make a more suitable silicon implant known as “Nearly Me,” which was then nicely described in our workbook and manufactured by her new company Ruthton.

We made it through, in the end, and I turned the boys’ attention to a review game in which I asked questions only about the doll portion of Ruth’s life, thereby avoiding further blushing and giggling.

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